Birthdays!

We recently had two parties for both my host parents, so here are some pictures!

Here's a picture from Sandra's birthday that I just love!





And here are two of my Tico cousins awaiting cake.

Thanksgiving cont.

On Sunday, Melana and I (both still fighting colds, mind you) prepared for a thanksgiving meal with the rest of the PCT community. There had been a similar gathering in my community on Friday, but I had missed It due to the fact that I was still running a fever. Fortunately, two of my friends were kind enough to walk over a plate of food that I could enjoy while busying myself with fighting a virus. Thanks Roxanna and Audrey!

Pictures of Melana's event below!





The turkey wasn't quite done so we wound up microwaving it to make sure no one got food poisoning (take note peace corps!)


With everyone waiting for food it was up to Melana to teach the boys how to carve a bird.


As the event waned to a close, dancing commenced...


With Megan still washing dishes.




Later on... Limbo!

This mission, should you choose to accept it...

Well, it’s official. Melana and I finally have our site assignment. On Wednesday, Melana and I received our very Mission Impossible style folders containing the details of our assignments. Though I am disallowed from disclosing the exact location of the site (clearly if I told you, I’d have to kill you), I can say that it is fairly close to the town of San Rafael de Guatuso in the northern province of Alajuela. I will be working with a women’s cooperative of cocoa growers and with high school and middle school students, though I won’t know more details until I actually get to to site and assess the community. Melana will be working with a local high school acting as an English teacher. As far as more details about her assignment, we’ll find out more on Tuesday. Due to some clerical error, Melana’s folder was a little.. erm... blank.

The site is about as far as you can get from the beach, but the good news is that that’s only about 3 hours in Costa Rica. Melana and I will be living on a farm amidst cocoa and pineapple fields. More details will come later, as I get them. Next week, Melana and I will be traveling out to meed our new family and to survey our site. Below you’ll see a picture of one of the locations that is supposably near our town. I’m psyched!

Happy Thanksgiving Everyone!

The Peace Corps Trainees and Staff celebrated with a Thanksgiving lunch yesterday. There were mashed potatoes, turkey, stuffing and even pumpkin pie. Unfortunately, there was also some very bacteria filled juice of some sort and today, everyone has food poisoning - and I mean everyone. I'm writing this between trips to the bathroom and everyone got out of class early today.

Melana really commented best on this when she said, "you know... of all the opportunities to get sick from the water and food of Costa Rica, who would have thought the Peace Corps would be the ones to wind up poisoning us."

Happy Thanksgiving!

CED Training

It has occured to me that, with all the things that I write on here, there is not that much information on what we're doing on a day to day basis. So, today I wanted to fill you in on what I've been up to for the past couple of weeks. Normally, I have Spanish class in my community with two other trainees three times a week. On Tues. and Thurs., however, we hike to the neighboring town of Tarbaca (there's a bus, but where's the fun in that?) To study business and economic development stuff specific to Costa Rica along with safety, security and medical procedures generic to Peace Corps. With the flooding and landslides throughout the country, though, things have NOT been normal.

Usually, at this point in training, the trainees would be sent to another volunteer's community to study the technical aspects of their projects. It is normally an intensive and challenging week that incorporates business theory with Spanish and cultural immersion. Sadly, the normal tech training that we normally had planned was canceled and replaced with a condensed week of business theory.

For this past week, our CED group was in Tarbaca for the whole week. During this time we conducted a market survey and started

a mock company. For most of the week we went over the technical specifics of a business plan. That means, roughly 6 hours of marketing followed by 6 hours of accounting and so on... We basically covered what a normal JA program would cover in 18 weeks. What's JA you ask? Well...

This is actually a great place to plug the JA program. The Junior Achievement program is a program designed to educate young people about the world of business and entrepreneurship. If you want to learn more specifics, you can check it out at www.JA.org.

We also recently had another birthday, and this time - thanks to the internet, the entire Diaz family was in attendance.

A Special Welcome

I would like to extend a special welcome to the students of Sea Girt School who are now following my blog! Please feel free to leave comments!

Here's a view out the window of the internet cafe I'm at!

Nicaraguan Border Dispute

Read all about the latest in international disputes. This one has been ramping up recently and is a very hot topic among Ticos at the moment. You can read about it here.

Ants!

Specifically Leaf-cutter ants. They're outside my house!

Landslide

I couldn't seem to get a good picture, this wad the best I could do.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Aftermath

As you may have heard, the rain last week turned out to be more than dreary weather for the people of Central America. In addition to the flooding that the lowlands experienced, landslides throughout the isthmus caused our president to declare a national emergency as much of the Costa Rican infrastructure was damaged, cutting off transportation and communications throughout the country. Beyond damage to highways, power lines and water pipes, hundreds of people lost their homes and at least 23 Ticos lost their lives. This is considered one of the worst disasters in recent Costa Rican history. Just before the rain finally let up, I received a call to be prepared to evacuate within the hour, due to the landslides that cut off my community and those beyond it. Fortunately, we did not have to be evacuated as the weather let up.

Most volunteers were without water, electricity and telephone services for at least a couple of hours. In my community, we lost water for about a week and a half. Melana’s home only recently got power and water back. It was an experience to have to physically gather all the water that I would be drinking, cooking with and bathing in for the time between. Much of the water was collected from containers we put out in the rain, however, extra water for dishes and toilet flushing was gathered from humanitarian water trucks that were sent up the mountain to help out the isolated towns. For my town and those beyond it, there is a single highway that had to be dug out by hand in order to let the relief vehicles up the pass. For more immediate support, helicopters surveyed the areas by the river to search for missing persons.

In addition, Ticos have been on edge due to the recent tension on the Nicaraguan border. You can read more about that here.

So, an eventful week for those of us down here in Costa Rica. Most of the roads are busted up pretty badly. My bus basically needs to go down steps to get me back to my community from the training site. Today, my friends and I were waiting for the bus for about an hour and a half before we learned that there had been a crash up the road and that no buses would be running for the rest of the night due to the fear that the road would collapse. So, we hired a taxi.

To end with a positive story. This weekend Melana and I also hit up the local farmer’s market in the somewhat larger town of Assari and had a great time. Shopping in the farmer’s market reminded me that soon Melana and I would be pretty much on our own as full fledged volunteers.

My address

Peace Corps office headquarters
Apartol Postal 1266-1000
San Jose, Costa Rica

Last address clearly didn't post.

Rain, rain....

It has been raining here for over 4 days straight now. “but, Pete,” you may say, “you live in a rain forest, why is this of any interest to me?” Well, normally it rains here in the afternoons and evenings and clears up by morning. We live on a mountain and, normaly, as the clouds ascend for the day, everyone up the mountain gets fog followed by rain. That’s how it normally goes. This is something completely different.

In fact, the whole of Costa Rica has received what is normally the entire cumulative rainfall for November and most of December in the last 96 hours. I used to think that this was due to now Hurricane Tomas as it passed by, but I’m beginning to think that there is another system at play here.

I say that I THINK that because information is not too easy to come by here. Internet is spotty, as is electricity and access to water. The entire country is in a state of emergency. We will likely be fine, and by “we” I mean those of us nestled securely in the mountains. Those outlying, however, are experiencing landslides and flooding. The lower lying areas by the Panamanian border and Limon seem hit hardest. I shutter to think what’s going on in Haiti as Hurricane (class 1) Tomas is sitting just outside of Port-au-Prince. While we’re at it, I hope Cuba’s doing alright.

I think pretty strange for a Hurricane/Tropical storm to be on the western side of Hispaniola without going through the Dominican Republic to get there.

So, here’s the scene. We are sitting at home, waiting it out running around the house catching leaks with buckets. That’s about it. Last night I went ahead and made bread with the family as a rainy day activity. Tonight, we’re sitting - I want to venture out into the town and get some playing cards but the rain is just too hard tonight.

The main road to my town is apparently completely blocked off. Which means that they’ll have to send in a helicopter to get us out of here if it comes to that. Not that there’s anywhere it can land as the ground is saturated. Anyway, it won’t come to that as all of us good volunteers are hunkered down with our families translating news broadcasts from Spanish. Miraculously, I have internet, so I’m letting everyone know that, as far as I can tell, every volunteer is absolutely fine. Melana is also doing alright, occasionally I get about 2 minutes to talk to her before she looses phone service again.

All PCV/Ts are on an alert known as “Standfast”, formerly “Cod

e Yellow”. Which means we are restricted from leaving our communities and must be ready to move to a safer location at a moment’s notice. I don’t think it will come to that, if we moved up to “code orange” it would be the first time in the history of Peace Corps that Costa Rica hit above standfast. Unfortunately though, the standfast order does mean that the PCV picnic was canceled, so I hope that get’s rescheduled.

Oh well, I could use a few days of rest anyhoo.

For more on the storm, you can read about it here (that means click on the pink "here" for my less computer savvy readers!)

Proof!

Here's that picture I promised. The handshake is obscured... but that's TOTALLY me with the president of Costa Rica!

Birds!

I've been getting some requests for animal pictures. Well, I don't have any, but Google Image was kind enough to give me the above picture! I see this occasionally at my site or on hikes.

Recouping lost posts

So, I discovered to my horror today that several of my posts over the last several days have been lost to the cavernous maw of cyber space. I'm currently attempting to track them down, but, in the meantime, I figure I should update you, my loyal readers. (all 3 of you)

This weekend, Melana and I were sent to a small town just outside of San Isidro to observe another couple and get a taste for what PCV life is like. The bus ride took about 3 hours though a mountain pass that was surprisingly cool. I took the opportunity to pick up some candied figs for our guests.... apparently they either pick them or make them up there because they were really cheap.

The town we were sent to is considered "urban" for your average Tico (Costa Rican) town that is not a major city. This means that most of the residents there had homes to live in, and more than 40% of the roads in town were paved.

At this point I should say that I am referring to the town we went to as “the town” on purpose. For security purposes we (that is PCV/Ts with blogs or access to social media) are to avoid mentioning the exact sites that current PCVs are assigned to.

Anyway, the town we went to had a interesting economy. Because of its proximity to the larger city of San Isidro, the town contained very few of its own services save for a single soda (a soda is like a small grocery and snack shop) which is directly across from the school and only open during school hours.

What the town DOES have in terms of income generation is a large dump that serves the nearby urban areas. Unfortunately, this is also a source of a lot of social hardships as the dump serves as a staging ground for a lot of unsavory characters who scavenge through the waste to salvage metals and other such items of value from the detritus. This, would not seem like such an unsavory way to make a living if the revenue from these activities was not supporting the drug habits of many of these individuals. This makes the town a bit of an unsafe place in the way of petty crime, particularly after dark.

There is also a sugar can plantation and a lot of trees that are completely saturated with an enormous population of vultures and other scavenging birds that live off the dump. Seriously, there are about 5 in every tree with branches to support them.

So, despite the description I’ve given of the place, I really liked it. Our hosts, Jared and Morgan, were wonderful and really gave us the rundown of what it’s like to be a PCV. We discussed strategies for community development and generally what it’s like to be married and in Peace Corps.

I should also mention that they HAVE to be two of the most positive people I’ve met since I’ve been here, which is saying a lot considering how positive most of the people here are.

While we were there we got to attend a Halloween party that they threw for some of the local children. This is quite a feat as most of the local Ticos believe that Halloween is the work of the devil. The kids did some bobbing for apples, then Melana helped with some face painting and I helped carve pumpkins before having them go around to all the doors in the house and Trick-or-treat.

While there, we also visited the school across the street and got to see the choir that Jared had been working with and the world map project that Morgan has nearly completed (fix Korea!)

On the last night there, I taught Morgan, and their host mom, who is totally awesome, to make flat bread. In total, I had a really good time and didn’t want to leave!

All of the above had been written on a broken down bus as Melana and I attempted to get back to our training communities in the pouring rain. Speaking of rain, we’re really feeling Tropical Depression Tomas at the moment. I put a couple buckets around the house tonight to catch the leaks.

Tonight, I also got a call telling me that we’re on alert for rain, and, more specifically, that I’m not allowed to hike to class tomorrow. oh well!

Time for bed!

btw - Internet access has been VERY spotty, so who knows when this will go up!